Art Gallery of Western Australia ignores ‘hate mail’ and embraces the young at art

WA’s state gallery has cracked the code for attracting a younger crowd, transforming the institution’s bottom line and its visitor numbers.

AGWA director Colin Walker with Calling for rain – The Wanyarang suite, by Meeyakba Shane Pickett. Picture: Colin Murty

If you take a walk through the Art Gallery of Western Australia, you’re now more likely to bump into a young adult than a senior citizen.

The 16-25 demographic now represents the single biggest cohort of visitors to state gallery, giving the institution the sort of visitor profile most galleries and museums dream of. One in four visitors falls into that age bracket. And some 40 per cent of visitors are aged between 16 and 35.

The reversal in the gallery’s demographic profile is the result of years of concerted effort by the gallery and director Colin Walker.

Mr Walker has introduced sweeping and often controversial changes in the way the gallery operates.

Historically, seven of the gallery’s nine exhibition spaces were devoted to permanent exhibits showcasing the most famous and valuable works from the collection.

Today, all nine are treated as temporary exhibits, with the gallery’s growing number of curators and associates constantly cycling through different artworks.

“In and of itself, that was quite a controversial thing to do, and that isn’t something that every gallery chooses to do,” Mr Walker told The Weekend Australian.

“But it wasn‘t on a whim, it was done as a means of changing the pace and the structure and the culture of the organisation.”

The ever-evolving exhibits play particularly well to a younger demographic drawn to the idea of a finite window to see particular pieces of art, and means repeat visitors can be guaranteed to see something new each time.

It has, Mr Walker admits, proved a difficult proposition for a cohort of visitors used to seeing particular pieces in particular places year after year. The days of the gallery’s dozens of classic, multimillion-dollar artworks being displayed in perpetuity are over.

AGWA director Colin Walker among some artworks in the gallery. Picture: Colin Murty

“We can’t have favourites, we’ve got 18,500 artworks,” he says. “(The classics) will come back, they’ll keep coming back, but in order to see them you have to keep coming back.”

In 2022, the gallery launched BlakLight – a six-week stint in which every gallery space was devoted to Indigenous artists.

That move brought both visitors and hate mail. Mr Walker was labelled a “grubby little Englishman who was out of his depth”, while another letter – fashioned out of cut-out newsprint like something out of Columbo – said “Be careful, we are watching you”.

But the exhibition represented a turning point for the gallery.

“It was an important statement for the staff to see that we’re not going to be playing it safe anymore,” Mr Walker said.

Jenna Duffus and Jackson Midgley, from Byron Bay in northern NSW, walking through some artwork at the Art Gallery of WA. Picture: Colin Murty

The shift means visitors are as likely to wander into an exhibition of photographs from an up-and-coming artist from Asia as they are to find a collection of Australian colonial-era landscapes.

Asia, Mr Walker says, had historically been neglected by the gallery, despite its geographical proximity and rich abundance of young artists with strong followings in Australia.

“Inevitably they’re young, inevitably they’re quite funky, inevitably they’ve got their own social media followers,” he said.